When They Guillotined the Booksellers: Paris, Spring 1794

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Barthélémy d’Arcole,
Inspector of bibliophilic aesthetics and modern heresies to the Guild of Bibliopolices.

To place Charles Meunier (1866-1948), and to understand the singular position he holds in French binding, one must first accept an idea that the “good taste” of his time condemned: that a design can be conceived quickly, can aim at novelty, and can still claim the rank of a work of art. Apprenticed to Bénard at the age of eleven, Meunier worked until the 1920s, and he still leaves an impression today through the boldness of his work. There, already, is the signature of a temperament: not a conservator of fine craftsmanship, but a man in a hurry to impose a manner.

After that apprenticeship with Bénard, where he stayed until he was sixteen, he became a journeyman with Domont, then with Maillard, and finally with Marius Michel, whom he left at twenty to set up on his own. Everything about him, one senses, had to go fast, very fast. Established, yet still in his twenties, he naturally struggled to stand apart from the style of his last employer, Henri Marius Michel, who then ruled over Parisian creation: ornamental flora, plant motifs, incised leather. But the man, as we shall see, was boiling with ideas and meant to impose a style of his own. He soon became one of the standard-bearers of the emblematic binding (reliure emblématique), alongside Pétrus Ruban, and threw himself headlong into numerous experiments, some of them hazardous, because, as Devauchelle stresses, his rapid apprenticeship left him no “time to perfect himself or to acquire all the mastery of which he was capable.” Here, from the outset, is the tension of an entire body of work: the fever of the creator set against the patience the trade demands.

Never mind the reservation: Charles Meunier teemed with ideas, and as Devauchelle again reports, he kept saying, “I haven’t the time for that, for I mean to produce, if I so please, one design a day.” The line could have been mere bravado; it was a programme. His output was indeed colossal: in 1897 Beraldi already put it at five or six hundred pieces. He also published, over twelve years, seven albums of one hundred plates each reproducing his best work (1893-1905); the albums were printed in one hundred copies and put on the market. That a craftsman should think to archive and circulate his own output says enough: he saw himself as a practitioner and, beyond that, as a school unto himself.

Charles Meunier was a great binder, and he also had a head for business. A colossal output, albums put on sale: he moved from 3 rue de la Bienfaisance to 75 boulevard Malesherbes (an address occupied, as this was written, by the engraver Benneton), where he had a magnificent shop that would house his publishing house and his review L’Œuvre et l’image. One recognizes a trait I have already described elsewhere in Octave Uzanne: that of the bibliophile who refuses to separate the object of commerce from the object of worship, and makes the shop a manifesto. Nobody should be surprised, then, that where many binders of the day sought recognition at the world’s fairs, Charles Meunier refused to compete at the one of 1900: partly because he did not think he could win the grand prize, but also, he added, for a reason worth a whole treatise on offended aesthetics: “Why would you have me pay 750 francs per square meter to show my bindings in display cases lost in the middle of the paperbound-books section, killed by that icy setting of white and black that drives the visitor away! The day there are 400,000 people at the Exposition, you find two of them in front of the bindings… and those two are binders!” There is, in this calculated disdain, more than a sulk: an art’s refusal to let itself be relegated, the conviction that binding has no need to beg for its place in a setting that “kills” it.

While continuing to practice and create, he explored other directions: he went further than Lortic by publishing his own books, whose deluxe copies he clothed in his characteristic designs. The first volume published and bound in this way was Les Fleurs du Mal, illustrated by Carlos Schwabe in 1900. Rather in the manner of Octave Uzanne, he founded in November 1900, with Léon Berubé, L’Œuvre et l’image, a monthly review of contemporary art and the illustrated book, which ran until September 1902; in 1904 it became the quarterly Les Arts bibliographiques, devoted to contemporary literature, technique and the arts of the book, and it stopped in December 1907. It carried articles on binding, of course, but also on engraving, on papermaking, and bibliographical news, all lavishly illustrated. He even pushed the logic as far as holding a public sale of part of his library: fifty volumes… bound by his own hand, on 21 November 1908.

He was a jack-of-all-trades, as we see, and he had firm opinions. Annoyed by the theses Beraldi developed in La Reliure du XIXᵉ siècle, he published in reply Les Réflexions d’un praticien en marge de « La Reliure du XIXᵉ siècle » de M. Henri Beraldi. As in Beraldi’s work, it runs to four volumes, a symmetry that in itself sounds like a challenge. According to Devauchelle, Meunier there “dissects the bibliophile’s work, picks out every error, page by page, and takes a malicious pleasure in inflating the most insignificant ones in order to discredit the author, who had the finesse to feign indifference.” In another work, Paroles d’un praticien pour l’art et la technique du relieur-doreur, he attacks the methods of the Estienne school in Paris. The man takes sides, as we see; and he gave lectures to defend his ideas, at the Grolier Club in New York in 1906, but also in Paris and Amiens. Then he retired in 1920, after organizing a second sale that was a kind of liquidation of all his activities: he put up for sale his binding workshop, taken over by Conil and Septier, who came from Marius Michel’s, and all his books, even those still in progress, stripped of their paper wrappers, sewn, or ready for gilding. He died in November 1948.

Let us now judge on the evidence, as befits the Inspection. Charles Meunier was an exceptionally gifted binder: his bindings resemble no others, and few French binders can be said to be the same, certainly not Capé or Trautz, for all their immense talent. His bindings can be identified at first glance, as can his collaboration with Carlos Schwabe, which also left a definitive mark on the history of Les Fleurs du Mal. It was the Geneva bibliophile Frédéric who introduced them, and their collaboration lasted a dozen years. Charles Meunier had already bound editions of Les Fleurs du Mal, but with his own edition he naturally surpassed himself: its execution took nearly four years. Bibliophiles will also note the extraordinary and unique set of the Œuvres complètes of Victor Hugo (Paris, J. Lemmonyer, G. Richard et Cie, Émile Testard, 1885-1895), in forty-five quarto volumes bound by Charles Meunier in claret morocco, with ninety incised and tinted leather panels in all set into the covers, where one can read two portraits of Victor Hugo and several emblematic characters of his work, down to those pearly reflections of which Meunier had the secret. This is the kind of undertaking before which praise bows: not a binding but a cathedral of leather.

For the Guild’s expert, this series moreover poses a textbook case. Charles Meunier bound three copies of this edition, three of the fifty copies on Japan paper, but he signed only number 3, which is also the only one on which he took care to sign and date each piece of leather. Number 1, belonging to the Lyon booksellers Bernoux, Cumin and Masson, was shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle and sold for 100,000 gold francs. Number 2 was in the library of the Lille bibliophile Hector Franchomme. As for number 3, it went through the fire of the auction room on 7 April 2011 at Aguttes in Lyon: estimated at €35,000 / €50,000, it was knocked down at €163,485. Emboldened by that success, it reappeared at Artcurial in Paris on 14 June 2017, this time as lot 38 and under a far more ambitious estimate of €180,000 / €200,000… where it went unsold, for want of a bidder. Fashions have their whims, and auctions their sulks: the same object, hammered down without difficulty at a reasonable price, is shunned as soon as it is given airs. The cathedral of leather has returned to the shadows. But a copy signed and dated by Meunier’s own hand, of such an edition, has never had to fear oblivion; it merely waits, like all great things, for the patience to return.

Meunier was, at bottom, neither a devotee of the past nor a gratuitous iconoclast. By wanting a design a day, by publishing his own books, by founding his reviews, by feuding with Beraldi and the Estienne school, he made speed a doctrine and daring a method. Where others sought mastery in slowness and recognition in official display cases, he preferred risk, controlled quantity, and a signature recognizable among all others. That is why, a century later, his bindings are recognized at a glance where so many irreproachable works blur together. The Inspection takes note: well-conducted heresies always end up entering the canon.

Sources: Devauchelle, Fléty, Wikipedia; Henri Béraldi, La Reliure du XIXᵉ siècle (Paris); by Charles Meunier himself, Les Réflexions d’un praticien… and Paroles d’un praticien pour l’art et la technique du relieur-doreur; and, for the auctions, the Aguttes catalog entry (7 April 2011) and the Artcurial entry (Paris, 14 June 2017, lot 38, unsold).